Essential Skills That Every SharePoint Consultants Should Possess

We all know that Microsoft SharePoint helps in document storage and collaboration and helps companies manage, organize and share documents with others easily. Today, it is considered to be the top business collaboration platform, as most enterprise employees use it. With more and more businesses migrating to SharePoint, the demand for experienced SharePoint consultants are also increasing and companies have to ensure that their IT teams are well prepared and have the expertise to customize and manage the highly technical platform.

So, if you are looking for an expert SharePoint consulting firm, then it is very important that your consultant should be familiar with some of the best practices and also have an urge for learning new technology. Having worked as a SharePoint consultant, I have identified some of the skills that I have mentioned below, so that you can make it a part of your selection criteria:

Follow a Service Delivery Methodology:

A successful SharePoint consultant should always follow a service delivery, which means clear understanding, defining and also maintaining business ownership of the solutions. Similar to ERP and CRM solutions, SharePoint implementation must follow a proper methodology to maximize the customer engagement and revenue to ensure proper delivery.  Analysis, design and development, deployment, operation should always be a part of the methodology that is used by a consultant whether they follow a traditional SDLC or an Agile approach and framework to deliver the services. The methodology should be scalable, modular, systematic, repeatable and highly industry focused.

Understanding of SharePoint “Out of the Box” Features:

Since custom development is possible in SharePoint, it should be kept reserved for some specific circumstances and done only after thorough evaluation of SharePoint capabilities that include Out of the Box features, SharePoint Designer, MS cloud applications and 3^rd party tools. The consultants should have the expertise to leverage the existing features of the platform to satisfy customer needs. Some important features that SharePoint offers out of the box are:

·         Content management

·         Business intelligence

·         Social computing

·         Search

·         Identity management

·         Branding

Have the Ability to Integrate Other MS Cloud Service

Microsoft is building an ecosystem of cloud based services that can offer support to both your SharePoint and Office 365 environment. Here are some of the cloud applications that come with Office 365 licenses:

·         Yammer

·         MS power apps

·         MS flow

·         MS planner

·         MS teams

Your SharePoint development Consultant should have the capability to identify which collaboration tool can help you to increase your business productivity and also put the employees into action.

Capacity to Create Custom Solutions:

When customer requirements cannot be met with the out of the box features, then it is important that the SharePoint development team is able to create a custom or hybrid solution using the SharePoint framework for example REST/OData endpoints, Client Object Model, Server Object Model and etc. These methodologies and skills are crucial for the success of SharePoint implementation and should also be the core criteria before selecting the consultation team.

Ability to Manage Large Document Libraries:

The most vital usage of SharePoint is proper storage of large number of documents and this can only be done after a successful SharePoint installation. Your team should be able to set up your document libraries via the libraries, meta data, folder structures, team store sets so that you can easily find your data later when you need that the most.

Also Read: The Contributions of SharePoint BI in Business

Good Knowledge of Third Party Tools:

Your SharePoint consultant should always know how to resolve any issues and achieve the best desired results. They should have good knowledge of a wide range of third party products so that it saves time from reinventing the wheel and get the best solution faster. They should know about Nintex, AvePoint, Sharegate and etc.

As SharePoint is increasingly becoming popular and the roles and responsibilities are also increasing based on the needs of the organization, it is important that the consultant you hire should follow some best practices and have skills in project management and administration.

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Important Points to Consider Before Choosing the Best SharePoint Analytics Tool

Selecting the best enterprise analytics tool is often a critical process and web analytics implementation is often a long term project with high financial and organizational costs. Web analytics are a useful weapon that helps to manage the site and is also one of the cornerstone of service delivery in SharePoint solutions that is provided to the users. Analytics help to improve the usability of the SharePoint solution, drives better collaboration, boosts ROI and enhances the overall productivity of the SharePoint users.

Since business intelligence needs and implementations are growing faster than ever, especially because of cloud computing and other cloud services, there is much pressure on ensuring that the customer interactions are traced as a key aspect of data gathering.

What is important is to choose the best SharePoint analytics tool for your business. SharePoint is a flexible and feature rich information management solution and can easily satisfy the demands of both small and mid-sized companies and enterprise level organizations.

Here are some important questions that you should ask before selecting the best SharePoint analytics tool.

The version of SharePoint that you are using:

This is specifically important because when it comes to dedicated SharePoint analytics tools. There is no one size fit all solution that goes with every edition of SharePoint development. So, in case if you go for a native intranet analytics tool, you have to be very careful with what you choose. SharePoint 2013 or SharePoint 2016 and Office 365 are all app based solutions, whereas SharePoint 2010 use the performance heavy wsp.farm solution.  Choosing SharePoint Site Analytics that is crafted to the needs as per your version of the intranet software is very important.

Dedicated or run of the mill SharePoint solution:

For this, you may consider tracking your traffic on the internet by using your regular web analytics solution.  This is easier and cheaper as you can stick to the tool that you already have. But when it is about analytics, this may not be the best option. Though you may try to configure your web analytics tool to fit SharePoint, in most cases a standard tool won’t apply to the SharePoint environment.  So if you are interested in squeezing the most out of your intranet tool, then I would advise you to invest in analytics tool that is created typically for SharePoint solutions.

Analytic approach and data accuracy:

If you are serious about growing your business, you will need to gather sold and reliable insights. Any issues with data sampling, adblocks and referral spams can seriously impact the data accuracy, and so it is best to solve them as soon as possible. It is very useful to have access to not only the aggregated data, but also have insights on individual users as well.

The features and the tracking types:

When we speak about business, mainly the enterprise level, you will require a SharePoint analytics tool that can offer you with insights on various aspects of your activities, like the web server logs, ecommerce, intranets and etc.  Based on the nature of your industry, you need different sets of reports and metrics. If you have your KPIs selected, it is time that you check if they are available in the tools that you are interested in.

Where do you want to store it?

Another major decision regarding the intranet analytics tool is the location where you want it to be stored: in the cloud, your own servers, or in a third party data center or somewhere else. Analyzing and collecting personal data in the cloud is often a delicate subject and each option has its own pros and cons. If you want to gain benefits from high level insights from your employee’s intranet activities, then choosing on-premises may be the best option.

The above points are the most important ones that you must consider while choosing SharePoint analytics tools for your business. This will help to narrow the search down the list and make your decision easier.

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